WTF is wrong with these people. I vote the building this was done in is evacuated, sealed and cleaned (flamethrower is most appropriate) to ensure this kind of variant never gets out. I'm agog we have smart folks in this country that are this stupid.
The variant - which is a hybrid of Omicron and the original Wuhan virus - killed 80 per cent of mice infected with it at Boston University.
www.dailymail.co.uk
And now for The REST of the story:
Boston University is refuting a series of misleading claims about research at the University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL). BU called the reporting “false and inaccurate,” and said, “this research made the virus replicate less dangerous.”
www.bu.edu
So the NIAID had no idea the BU folks were doing this research. The NIAID's head of the Dept of Microbiology and Infectious disease said publicly: "The BU teams application did not state that they wanted to do this precise work, nor did they make clear that they were doing experiments that might involve enhancing a pathogen of pandemic potential in the progress reports provided to NIAID. I think we're going to have conversations over upcoming days."
That's a brutal,
brutal statement from a government official. BTW, the text of the study is
here. Here is the first paragraph:
The recently identified, globally predominant SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant (BA.1) is highly transmissible, even in fully vaccinated individuals, and causes attenuated disease compared with other major viral variants recognized to date. The Omicron spike (S) protein, with an unusually large number of mutations, is considered the major driver of these phenotypes. We generated chimeric recombinant SARS-CoV-2 encoding the S gene of Omicron in the backbone of an ancestral SARS-CoV-2 isolate and compared this virus with the naturally circulating Omicron variant. The Omicron S-bearing virus robustly escapes vaccine-induced humoral immunity, mainly due to mutations in the receptor binding motif (RBM), yet unlike naturally occurring Omicron, efficiently replicates in cell lines and primary-like distal lung cells. In K18-hACE2 mice, while Omicron causes mild, non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe disease with a mortality rate of 80%. This indicates that while the vaccine escape of Omicron is defined by mutations in S, major determinants of viral pathogenicity reside outside of S.
This is pretty damn plain text here. They took current COVID, you know the variant that is arguably the most transmissible disease ever seen, and took the part that makes it transmissible and stuck it on the original, incredibly virulent strain. Congrats, guys, you made a pandemic organism that killed at least 10M people and got it to robustly "escape vaccine induced humoral immunity".
I go back to "WTF were these people thinking?" Not only do I want an explanation at this point, but I would think that every one of these morons should be fired and probably prosecuted.